Co-developers Epic Games and People Can Fly put the finishing touches on their cooperative juggernaut.

As the next generation of home
consoles slowly emerge into the
limelight and enter the minds of the mass consumer, it's
great to see some current gen games continue to show their potential.
Take Gears
of War, a series that
practically signaled the start of this current gen back in late 2006.
At the time, developer Epic Games delivered a memorable and new
third-person shooter IP that certainly looked impressive, but also
ushered in fun gameplay mechanics through an impromptu cover-based
system -- one that urged players to use cover as respite from the hail
of enemy bullets. But who knew the idea of campaign coop over the
Internet could possibly impact the experience the way it did? And post
GoW, the entire shooter genre followed suit.

In hindsight, those three
pillars of visual bombast, fun combat loops, and cooperative play over
the net defined lots of shooters during this console cycle, but after a
trilogy of GoW games -- delivered relatively closely over a five-year
span -- how can the series possibly stay fresh and fun? Surprisingly
the latest game, Gears
of War: Judgment, makes a strong
argument that the series isn't only surprisingly relevant, but that the
developers also figured out some neat tricks other video game makers
should crib.

Is Proteus a game? Honestly, I don't give a damn.

You wake up at sea. The quiet
water around you melds into the peaceful
tones of a horn-based melody. You spot an island in the distance, and
decide to swim towards it. Once you step foot on the warm sands of the
beach, the music changes into something less ephemeral and more
tangible. You spot a group of crabs just down the way, and when you
approach them, the sound of bongo drums enters your ears. As they
scurry away, so does the percussion. You distance yourself from the
water and head towards a grove of cherry blossoms in the midst of a
snowfall of petals. Immersing yourself in the floating colors brings
entirely new instruments into the mix of sounds. This is Proteus.

Over the past few weeks,
there have been many debates over whether Proteus is a game or
not. Our buddy Dan Stapleton over at GameSpy
argues that the PC
title's inherent lack of any a defined objective stops it
from being a game. Others have stated that the lack of interaction that
the player has with the world is what causes Proteus to lose its
moniker.

Bungie's ambitious new shooter defies description. But is that a good or bad thing?

Earlier this week, Bungie invited the press corps up to their new studio in Bellevue with the intention of taking the wraps off Destiny, their long-rumored follow-up to Halo. As everyone sat down, the anticipation over what Bungie had to show was palpable. Several hours later, the excitement was still there, but there were plenty of questions as well.

An upcoming take on sci-fi horror inspired by all of my favorite things.

My
favorite works of horror are all built upon the foundation of three
solid principles: a strong sense of place, clearly defined
consequences, and an ability to create expectations while
simultaneously defying them. It doesn't matter if it's Halloween,
The
Colour Out of Space, or
Silent
Hill -- the medium makes no
difference. These three elements are
at the core of every work I consider to be truly horrifying, so it's
with that in mind that the upcoming PC title Routine
has piqued my
interest.

Unveiled at last year's
Gamescom, Routine is the first work from the UK-based Lunar Software.
It's a survival horror game set in an abandoned lunar base. Yep, that's
a pretty strong sense of place. And there are no extra lives in the
game -- permadeath means that one wrong move, and you're starting over.
Well, those are some clearly defined consequences. And just take one
look at the trailer, and you'll see that Routine is filled with the
unexpected. It's this last element that left me searching for answers,
and who better to turn to than Lead Artist and Designer Aaron Foster.

When is a Capcom game not a Capcom game? Remember Me is set on giving you a hint.

In terms of creativity, particularly world-building, I find that the game developers that nail those the best are the Japanese and the French. So it comes as little surprise to see big Japanese publisher Capcom sign small French developer Dontnod and their debut action-adventure game, Remember Me. What is surprising is how instantly risky the game looks, though not necessarily because of creative ambition. Rather, does Remember Me even fit the label of "Capcom game?"

Most people wanted Revelations on a console to begin with, and Capcom's ready to deliver with a pretty faithful port.

The nature of the "exclusive"
has been an increasingly hot topic among game fans since at least the
2000s. One game can be seen as the savior of the platform; the one that
will boost it to new heights, because watching big companies make money
is fun, right? But in this generation, more and more exclusive games
end up becoming multiplatform titles available to anyone, where it
doesn't matter which system you bought. Eventually, the scorned fanboys
move on to their next point of contention, and everybody expects it to
happen to big-budget third-party console games. But what happens when
an exclusive handheld game goes straight to consoles in just over a
year?

Monster Hunter hits America again in the best way possible (so far), but will it -- can it -- stick?

Capcom made waves when they first announced that the canonical third Monster Hunter game was coming to the Wii, and got even more excitement when they localized it for America and Europe. Though as big a franchise as it is in its homeland of Japan, Monster Hunter Tri didn't quite blow up in the West the way it could have (or should have, depending on your thoughts). The good news is that it effectively has another chance. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is the most content-rich Monster Hunter game, with more new monsters to go and (try to) kill, more equipment to craft and amass, and a pile of other checks and balances to further hone the game. Even so, there's several previous Monster Hunter games that suggest if you build it, they might not come.

Which is too bad, because Monster Hunter is good fun with the right level of dedication, and it's multiplayer-driven, which is not hard for Western gamers to get behind. Sure, one player can accomplish a lot by themselves, but to beat monsters the best and fastest ways, teamwork is a necessity. Like the PSP Monster Hunter games, the 3DS version allows four-player local multiplayer, yet won't be able to go online (an unfortunate carryover from the Japanese version, but ad-hoc Monster Hunter rules the country anyway). However, the Wii U version is fully set up for playing online, and will work similarly to the original Wii version. As a consolation of sorts, due to the boon of having Ultimate on two systems, that means if a friend or three come over with their 3DS versions, they can use that to play in a local, Wii U-hosted multiplayer excursion as well. I tried it out myself, and it works as advertised.

The crowdfunded RPG shows off its gameplay for the first time.

As one of the most highly funded videogame projects on Kickstarter -- only Obsidian's Project Eternity and Double Fine Adventure have collected more through Kickstarter alone -- a lot of eyeballs are going to be on Wasteland 2 as it approaches its release. That's even truer because this is a game that aspires to be a worthy follow-up to a classic game that led to the creation of the original Fallout. Now that we've finally gotten a real look at it, so far, so good, it would seem.

Over the weekend, developer inXile released the first gameplay footage of Wasteland 2. While it was sure to attract complaints from those who didn't get precisely what they wanted (like having it mirror everything the original game did), it does look promising. And that's reassuring news -- inXile's track record has been inconsistent, with past projects including The Bard's Tale (a solid game) and Hunted: The Demon's Forge (not so much). No definitive conclusions can or should be drawn from a single 15-minute video demonstration, particularly when the game in question is far from complete, but we can better glean what the game is shooting for.

The RPG classic could win a new audience, but what does it leave behind?

I love the Dragon Quest series, but I confess it's a taste I've only acquired in recent years. After playing the original Dragon Warrior on NES, I didn't touch the series again until Dragon Warrior VII arrived on PlayStation a decade later. And, in all honesty, I kind of hated what I played of DQVII. It felt slow, tedious, ugly, and incredibly backward. The gorgeous Final Fantasy X was slated to hit the U.S. a few weeks later, so DQVII seemed like some sort of weird relic of a bygone age. I played a couple of hours, got bored, and wandered off.

Since then, I've come to realize my mistake in writing off the game so hastily. My tastes have changed since then, and so has my appreciation for the good, old-fashioned game design ethos Dragon Quest represents. Needless to say, I've been looking forward to the new 3DS remake of DQVII with great anticipation; it's not so much an occasion to give the game a second chance and see if I'll like it -- I'm sure I will -- as it is a chance to finally play the thing, period. As my tastes have changed, so has my freedom to enjoy a 100-hour RPG experience, and the prospect of having such a slow burn of an adventure on a portable system makes me a lot more likely to play all the way through it than I would in its original console form. (Thank you, San Francisco Municipal Transportation System, for my 90 minutes of quality gaming time each weekday... or 150 minutes if you're having one of your all-too-frequent system meltdowns.)

CD Projekt provides one of our first glances at a next generation game.

We
know that the future is nigh. We already shared all of our insight
into what Sony
has planned for February 20, and
it's all-but assured that Microsoft will be holding
some form of equally-profound event at some point in the near future.
But while you dream about the number of strange technical numbers
associated with your console du jour, Game
Informer has given us a tangible
glimpse at what those the next-gen hardware is capable of via their
most recent cover story centered around The
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

We know that CD Projekt is
working on it, and that the game will wrap up Geralt's trilogy. We also
know that it's supposed to be big (at least one million Skyrims).
But the real information can be gleaned from the handful of screenshots
that GI gathered. Take a look.

Can the holy trinity of vampire hunters and a handful of classic elements restore the series to its former self?

I hate to examine games from a fan's perspective, but sometimes I can't quite separate myself from a series no matter how hard I try. Last week, I saw Castlevania Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate, a Nintendo 3DS entry in Konami's resurrected vampire-hunting action series. But for the first time in a while, I left a demo ambivalent and unsure of a final assessment.

The follow-up to Thirty Flights of Loving looks equally intriguing.

I
believe in Brendon Chung. The
designer of Thirty
Flights of Loving, one of my
favorite games of 2012,
views our medium in a way that few do. He eschews the norm, tells
stories in intriguing ways, and has no problem making short form games.
Your first trip through Thirty Flights of Loving is likely to take you
less than 15 minutes to complete, but damn if it isn't worth it.

So it's with great pleasure
that I present you with the first trailer for Quadrilateral
Cowboy,
Chung's newest effort that's set to release sometime later on in the
year. QC continues the story of Citizen Abel, the La Nouvelle
Vague-inspired hero of Gravity Bone
and Thirty Flights of Loving.
Despite the fact that he may or may not die at the end of each prior
installment, he certainly looks alive and kicking in this brief
montage. The game is centered around the concept of hacking, going as
far as to including mechanics that force the player to use programming
languages in order to press on. Chung has also noted that QC has an
open, sandbox design, which is a departure from the much narrower
experiences of his previous games.

Media Molecule seems determined to kill us with kindness.

Last week, Sony invited a group
of us media folk down to Los Angeles to
get our hands on some of their biggest games for 2013. You may have
already read my thoughts on Killzone:
Mercenary, God
of War: Ascension, and The
Last of Us. Though my opinion of
the three of them varied quite dramatically, the one thing they all
shared was a common bloodlust. During my time with the three games, I
probably killed roughly one thousand people, creatures, and gods. I
performed headshots, tore bodies in half, and smashed faces in using a
brick. By the time I was done, I wanted to drop my controller, lay down
on a bowling alley lane and resign with the words "I'm finished," like
Daniel Day Lewis at the end of There Will Be Blood.
But I'm glad I didn't because Sony showcased a fourth game that washed
the slate clean and made me feel like I did back when I was a child;
that time when we all fell in love with this medium in the first place.

Tearaway is Media Molecule's
upcoming Vita adventure singularly built around the concept of paper.
While that may sound strange at first, I honestly can't remember the
last time I played a game that so faithfully stuck to a central theme
across every facet of the experience. Your hero is on a mission to
deliver an unknown message that's contained within an envelope -- the
very same envelope that acts as his or her head. The entire world is
composed of paper -- flower petals curl like ribbons, paper towel tubes
act as hallways, and a bit of glue allows you to walk on walls. It's
like an elementary school art class became sentient overnight and
decided to see what it could make of itself. The mere act of traversing
the world brought back wildly fond memories of wandering the front yard
of Princess Peach's castle in Super
Mario 64 -- it's a type of
genuine, uncynical exploration that you don't see very often in 2013.

Going hands-on with Naughty Dog's latest proves to be a tense, atmospheric event.

I
can't remember the last time was genuinely terrified while
playing a video game. Slender?
Amnesia?
Silent
Hill 2? Don't
get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of any work of art that can
elicit true fear inside of me, be it a film, story, or video game. But
most games that bill themselves
as "horror" are
more concerned with cheap scares and crutching on gore than with building a
mood which toys with our deepest fears. So it was to my complete surprise that
Naughty Dog seems to understand this definition perfectly, as The
Last
of Us could very well be one of
this generation's truly
horrifying experiences.

So many elements of the game
seem to coexist for the common goal of creating and maintaining an
extraordinary level of tension. E3 showed us what Joel and Ellie would
have to deal with in terms of human marauders who've been
pushed to the fringes of humanity, but this preview event focused
squarely on the fungal infection that caused the world to go to hell in
the first place. It's here that The Last of Us almost feels
like it's picking up the survival horror baton that so many
once-terrifying series have dropped in recent installments. The world
it builds, the aesthetics it fronts, and the moods it exudes are
singularly terrifying and completely fantastic, and it all starts with
the impeccable sound design.

Kratos
is angry. For some unknown
reason, his body is chained to a pair of massive pillars; his limbs
stretched far apart as if to embrace whatever crime it was that he
committed. He's mocked by one of the three Furies, ancient
beings who, for some reason, have taken offense against the warrior.
But he is no God, not yet. As a prequel to the prior installments in
the series, Kratos (Man of War?) begins the game in this strange
predicament. And yet once he frees himself from these shackles and the
player is allowed to take control, one fact becomes immediately clear
-- we've done this before.

Every action I took throughout
the opening 30 minutes of God
of War: Ascension resonated with
what
I've been doing over the course of the past 8 years. It was
more than just muscle memory; it's as if the series is a
vinyl album stuck in an infinite loop as it futilely attempts to find
the next groove, doomed to repeat the same crumbs of a song. I defeated
the hordes of minor enemies by smashing the square and triangle
buttons, just as I had in the original God of
War. I opened glowing red
chests and used their contents to upgrade by blades, just as I had in
God of
War II. I engaged in a variety
of simple but cinematic QTEs,
just as I had in God of
War III. And once I came to the
lengthy battle
with the gargantuan Hecatonchires, whose imprisoned body was the entire
level, I couldn't help but feel like I'd done this
before. This was how I slayed the Hydra in 2005. This was how I brought
down the Colossus of Rhodes in 2007. This was how I scaled Mt. Olympus
and dethroned Poseidon in 2010.